Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Custom Surgical: The idea behind our company was born about two years ago in Chile, after our CEO, Federico (32), a mechatronics engineer with a MSc in Biomedical Computing (TU Munich) and ten years of professional experience as a clinical specialist, met the renowned retinologist Dr. Daniel Alarcón (43) and, together with him and other physicians, developed the MicroREC, our first product. Since then, our team has grown to include additional experts in marketing and sales, software, and biomedical engineering.
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Custom Surgical: Our goal as a company is to provide every person on this planet with access to high-quality healthcare. Due to our network and the expertise of our team, we are initially focusing on the field of ophthalmology. Our products enable ophthalmologists to easily digitally record their procedures and use their smartphones for telemedicine applications. The possibilities opened up by our product solve numerous communication problems that frequently arise in this field: We enable every ophthalmologist to examine their own patients remotely, share their work with the medical community regardless of budget, and discuss examination results in more complex cases with colleagues. Furthermore, our product has great potential for use in medical education.
Custom Surgical: “Our product is lighter, more mobile, and significantly more affordable than competitors’ products.”
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Custom Surgical: Our competitors are essentially a few large manufacturers of medical devices and microscopes. Some of them have developed special cameras that also enable the recording of examinations and surgeries on the eye. However, these cameras only work on the devices of that particular manufacturer. Our solution, on the other hand, is compatible with microscope systems from almost every manufacturer. Furthermore, our product is lighter, more mobile, and significantly more affordable than our competitors, both in terms of purchase and use.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Custom Surgical: So far, we have had to contend with three main challenges:
- Logistics: Initially, participation in conferences was our primary marketing tool and sales channel. However, as we grew, we began receiving more and more online orders from a variety of different countries. Since each country we want to export our systems to has different import regulations and shipping costs and sales potential also vary significantly, we initially focused on standardizing our shipping process and optimizing our costs to facilitate import into specific zones and improve the customer experience with us.
- Scaling: Due to the sharp increase in the number of customers from different countries, we were looking for solutions to scale our sales. We therefore began searching for dealers who would distribute our devices for us, thus offering us the opportunity to sell in large quantities and reach more end customers. This required us to adapt our marketing and sales strategies and establish efficient processes for negotiations, conducting due diligence, and drafting contract documents.
- Production: The current pandemic has favored companies like ours that bring the benefits of new applications of ICT to medicine. In recent months, we've observed an exponential increase in demand and struggled to produce our products quickly enough. To keep pace with this growth, we've expanded our team and optimized some of our processes. In fact, Business Insider recently published its list of the fastest-growing German startups, ranking us 36th among more than 16,000 startups.
“We knew very early on that we had found a product-market fit”
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Custom Surgical: By launching our first product on Kickstarter and receiving funding from our customers, we knew very early on that we had found product-market fit. Therefore, we consider ourselves extremely fortunate to be generating five-figure monthly revenues and experiencing such strong growth through bootstrapping at such an early stage. As of July 2020, we have sold to almost 30 countries. To establish ourselves even faster in the market in the future, we have made some improvements to our product and diversified our offering. We expect our revenue to increase fivefold next year compared to this year. We plan to close a Series A financing round in early 2021. To all investors out there: Please contact us if you are interested!
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Custom Surgical: Munich is a great city for entrepreneurs, especially in the medtech sector. The startup scene offers a wealth of events and a great network for meeting potential partners and learning from other highly successful entrepreneurs. The city also attracts many investors and has a large number of support programs for young startups. We ourselves recently participated in the Xpreneurs accelerator program run by UnternehmerTUM. In addition, the fact that two of the world's best universities are located in Munich (TUM and LMU) means there is a wealth of young talent in the city. Furthermore, the proximity to the universities also gives startup teams access to leading research institutions and experts in virtually every field.
Munich Startup: Coworking or your own office?
Custom Surgical: Our Munich office is currently located in the Plug and Play coworking space. However, several members of our team live in other countries (Brazil, Colombia, Romania, France, etc.) and therefore work from home.
